Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, but can often seem frustrating. A new software product  inadvertently demonstrates the challenge of collaborating with others through a PC.

The topic is covered in a recent post called True Collaboration Via the Cloud:

One of the reasons that collaboration is so difficult is that in order to bring everything together in a manageable way, IT organizations have to spend an inordinate amount of time first integrating about a dozen technologies with about a half-dozen applications. Then they have to support all the custom integration on an ongoing basis.

Although this statement helps to advertise a new product that addresses the issue, it demonstrates one of the key problems of most software applications. Instead of enabling workflow among different stakeholders that exchange and produce different kinds of information, programs usually offer self-contained features. A simple example is copy and paste. How many of us use this crude feature to manually complete work tasks because programs cannot talk to each other?

Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Solow once wrote that “You can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.” This claim seems as true today as when he first stated it back in 1987. The path to improving productivity with computers is not in training or in new software, but in understanding the business process models and adapting to the capabilities and limitations of the machines. This is what we do for clients at Slaughter Development every day. Contact us to learn more.

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